2014 Research Excellence Framework Released!

Using the REF to rate whole universities and try and rank them is an exercise of limited usefulness - you go somewhere to study your SUBJECT. The fact that institution X appears marginally stronger than institution Y simply because its strengths lie in disciplines other than the one you want to study seems a weird reason to make your choice (if I want to study History, for example, the fact that an institution is belting at Chemical Engineering is not really pertinent). Some places which appear modest overall may still be world-leaders and innovators in particular niche subjects.

An even if your subject scores highly in the REF at a particular institution, don't imagine that undergraduates will necessarily benefit much. Decent researchers often do decent research because they're not teaching very often! And inspiring teachers may not be cutting-edge researchers.

The purpose of the REF is to help allocate funding for research - and for expensive 'Big Science'm funding probably does need to be concentrated rather than diluted across lots of institutions (economies of scale and best value for money)- but I've never understood why that argument holds with arts and humanities subjects - or even social science.

I think the main reason unis are "bragging" about their results is because the REF is only done once every 7 years or so and on top of that its the most "official" since its done by the UK government and has a direct effect on funding in the future. I don't even blame them for trying to manipulate the results to make them look good. Universities are almost a business these days, they want to attract the most funding, the best researchers, the best students etc so they need to maintain their public image and if that means cherry picking data, who are we to stop it.

I don't believe UCL has as much as 3 times the academic staff as Cardiff.

http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/ng-interactive/2014/dec/18/university-research-excellence-framework-2014-full-rankings

UCL has 2566, Cardiff has 738. UCL has 3.5 times more.

Too bad the world doesn't change with your beliefs.

You don't get the point.

Are you saying UCL has 3.5 times the staff of Cardiff when we look at both their overall academic staffing?

For every academic staff Cardiff has, UCL has 3.5 staff?

Or you just don't realise that the fact UCL is confident enough to put forward 3.5 times of its staff than the amount of staff that Cardiff is willing to put forward shows that UCL has better quality researchers?

Do you have any statistics to back up your claim that UCL has put in most of their staff whilst Cardiff has not?

I don't have statistics.

Common sense just tells me that Cardiff, a university with a larger student body than UCL, is unlikely to have a much smaller academic staff than UCL.

Worse still, the academic staff so small it would be almost one third of UCL's.

Common sense tells me that is unlikely. Cardiff cannot be that understaffed even though it is inferior to UCL.

UCL must have put out far more staff forward for assessment, which means any table ranking Cardiff above UCL in terms of quality is nonsense.

You really like to pull claims out of thin air, don't you...?

UCL has around 36,000 students, whilst Cardiff has 27,774 students. Not only does Cardiff not have a larger student body than that of UCL's, UCL has 1.3 times more students.

With administrative staff, UCL has 11,024 of them whilst Cardiff has 5,230 of them. That is 2.1 times.

At the same time, UCL has £85.9 million and Cardiff has £27.5 million in their endowments, 3.1 times, meaning a much higher potential of having proportionally more staff members with more money.

I don't think UCL has 3.5 times more academics than Cardiff has, but with 2.1 times more admin staff, you would think that they would probably have a number of academics closer, if not surpassing, that.

These were the figures I was looking at.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_universities_in_the_United_Kingdom_by_enrollment

I guess the 2 acquisition in 2 years has increased its student body. And Cardiff student numbers has decreased by 2,000.

That said, producing 35 staff for every 10 Cardiff produces when it only has 21 to every 10, shows it is undeniably a superior institution that can bring forward more quality research staff.

Do you have any statistics to back up your claim that UCL has put in most of their staff whilst Cardiff has not?

The figures are apparently as follows:

Cardiff have 1182 eligible staff and submitted 738, i.e. 62.4%

UCL have 2810 eligible staff (including 311 from the recently 'acquired' Institute of Education) and submitted 2566, i.e. 91.3%

http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/ng-interactive/2014/dec/18/university-research-excellence-framework-2014-full-rankings

UCL has 2566, Cardiff has 738. UCL has 3.5 times more.

Too bad the world doesn't change with your beliefs.

Thanks. So both institutions did get most of their staff submitted, and UCL does have 2.4 times more academics than Cardiff has.

UCL submitted 46.3% more of its research staff for assessment than Cardiff. That is a HUGE difference

How did you come up with 46.3%?

I think that's research staff that are put forward for REF assessment. According to this table London Met only has 80 research staff, and I severely doubt this is the total number of its research staff given it has over 22,000 students